theverge.com Archives - 16 January 2013, Wednesday

The controversial digital currency Bitcoin has a display at CES. It's a good-sized booth, featuring a giant picture of a smiling woman holding an iPhone running a Bitcoin app. Crystal Campbell, a waitress who works at an Orlando restaurant that accepts Bitcoin, greets curious conferen...

Online gambling sites are turning their attention towards Bitcoin, with BusinessWeek describing how one site is letting US users pay with the digital tender following a huge poker site crackdown in 2011. Money never hits US banks at all, allowing the sites to operate without fear of r...

Bitcoin-Central is set to become the first Bitcoin exchange to operate as a real bank, thanks to new approvals from French regulators. Run by Paymium , Bitcoin-Central partnered with two French companies — the payment processor Aqoba and bank Credit Mutuel — to create a payment servic...

The total number of Bitcoins in circulation just hit 10.5 million, triggering a safeguard against inflation that was hardcoded into the digital currency. This means a drastic change in the number of new Bitcoins being created, which is expected to have a huge impact on the economy tha...

The anonymous online black market known as the Silk Road, which offers everything from drugs to pirated Red Bull, is back up after an outage that lasted about two weeks. When Silk Road became inaccessible earlier this month, the rumors started flying . Its psuedonymous operator Dread ...

Bitcoin has been described as cash for the internet, but gold is a more appropriate analogy. Anyone can "mine" Bitcoins on their own computers by running a program that’s designed to produce a 64-digit number in a resource-intensive way. This program randomly computes a cryptographic ...

WordPress, the popular blogging platform / content management system is expanding its payment options for upgrades like going ad-free. Beginning today, users around the world will be able to pay with Bitcoin — the unregulated, decentralized digital currency built on public-key cryptog...

Some of the biggest names in the world of Bitcoin, the unregulated virtual currency with a small but devoted user base, are looking to give it a friendlier public face. Announced last week, the Bitcoin Foundation — which counts lead developer Gavin Andresen and Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpel...

While the decentralized and anonymous nature of Bitcoin makes the currency attractive for thieves, the hack was a result of unrelated weak security, something Shtylman now says he's fixed. Many Bitcoin users expressed support online for getting the service back online, and Shtylman re...

Early today a hacker who claims to be affiliated with Anonymous posted documents to Pastebin with some startling claims: someone, the statement claimed, has copies of US presidential candidate Mitt Romney's tax returns. Mitt Romney has come under some scrutiny and criticism — mostly f...

Popular Bitcoin exchange BitFloor — described by its owner as "the #4 USD exchange and #1 in the US" — has been forced to suspend operations after the equivalent of $250,000 was stolen in a virtual heist. Writing in a post on the Bitcoin Forum last night, founder Roman Shtylman explai...

Remember pirateat40, the e-currency banker we speculated could be the Bernie Madoff of Bitcoin ? Well, it looks like he owes a lot of people money. On August 17, pirateat40 announced the closure of Bitcoin Savings & Trust , a virtual hedge fund that promised to pay high rewards to inv...

In a blog post, the company explained that MasterCard had denied any knowledge of the plan for two reasons. Firstly, BitInstant says that its unnamed partners, who "have been working with MasterCard for many years," will continue their relationship with the credit card company, rather...

MasterCard has said that it's not aware of plans to develop a credit or debit card based around Bitcoin virtual currency. Yesterday, it was rumored that transfer service BitInstant was partnering with two unnamed banks to release a Bitcoin MasterCard in the next two months. But accord...

BitInstant is reportedly set to launch an international debit/credit card based on the BitCoin virtual currency. That's according to Coding In My Sleep , which has published the transcript of an online chat in which BitInstant co-founder Charlie Shrem allegedly confirmed that the comp...

The market for Bitcoin — the digital currency of choice for the tech-savvy libertarian set — is hot again. The price of the popular online currency has steadily risen over the last six months, and the number of Bitcoin transactions per day has increased roughly 400 percent since May. ...

Researchers in Singapore have achieved what they claim is the "highest possible resolution" for color laser printing. The team demonstrated the technique by printing the common Lena test image at just 50 by 50 micrometers and around 100,000dpi — any smaller and the light would bounce ...

It's therefore somewhat ironic to see Bitcoiners turn to the law to bail them out, but victims have no other choice. There is a group of Bitcoiners who monitor and investigate suspicious activity, but it has little power to act. Members of the Bitcoin community are coming to the reali...